2043 - 2059: Red Plague
2043 - 2059: Red Plague The single positive thing to be said about the period of time known as the chaos wars was that throughout all the battles, inside countries, between countries and so on, not one state launched a nuclear weapon to the effect of mutually assured destruction. There were rumours that an attempt had been made by a premier, only for the effort to be blocked by their own staff and the leader killed. It would seem that the deterrent had remained a key factor throughout as people realised nuclear war would spell death for the entire planet. That aside, the world of the early 2040s was a world ravaged by death. Mass graves gave way to disease and famine, and some say the air itself was tinged with the smell of sulphur across the globe, be it from ash clouds, fires or increased industrial output. There were also rumours of chemical and biological weapons, though these were unsubstantiated. Certainly the rise of the red plague was not presumed to be a planned event. The first cases emerged in Asia, with reports of people having gone mad with rage, and attempting to eat the flesh of the uninfected. Many people in media referred to this as the 'Zombie Plague' because the behaviour of the infected seemed to match those of mythological creatures from horror stories. Though the infected were adrenalin fuelled and stronger and faster than normal people as a result of their infection, they were not the undead, and the plague was somewhat contained once breakouts were identified. Towns might find a breakout and within hours there could be a dozen corpses before armed police or military would show up and put an end to the sufferer's misery. It was quickly established that execution was the only way to deal with those past the second stage of infection. There was no cure established and due to the highly infectious nature of the condition and the speed with which the infected would turn completely, there was little study that could be done. After the first 18 months, governments thought that they had the condition contained within a few pockets of the population, even though by this point the disease had spread across the globe. There was an issue when the disease jumped species and began infecting birds. Bird were affected differently to humans, without quite the same flesh crazed anger, but the main issue was that with birds now carrying the contagion, it became that much harder to contain. The plague therefore sprang up in further pockets around the globe, over the course of over a decade, despite massive culls of both people and animals. By 2059 numbers had dwindled sufficiently to determine this as the end to the plague. The last confirmed case was in a mid western town in the United States, in 2060, where the Irons family, the last to be infected, all tragically (or heroically) isolated themselves in the first stage of their infection, and then committed suicide. No further cases were ever reported, but by then, the plague had claimed over 53 million lives.